This week I share the eight different types of inner critic.

Plus I explain why you can't keep trying to confront a situation with somebody who is hell-bent on trying to avoid that confrontation.

I'm Natalie Lou, a writer based in Southeast London who is dedicated to helping people

to improve their emotional and relationship literacy.

Let's kick this off.

I read a blog this week titled, She Divor's Me because I left dishes by the sink.

Where the author explains how his resistance to putting a glass in the dishwasher instead of on the counter

became symbolic to his now ex-wife of his lack of appreciation, respect, and love for her.

And it got me thinking, does not putting a glass away on a regular basis

and other repetitive niggles about, you know, household chores such as, you know,

leaving the cap off the toothpaste or not squeezing the toothpaste properly,

you know, not squeezing it out properly, or anything else like that.

Do they symbolize lack of appreciation, respect, love, etc?

Or are our issues about those things really representative of something else?

One of the things that we have to recognize is that there is a big difference between needs and preferences.

Like, we need to have mutual love, care, trust and respect in our relationship. But do we need to have the glass put away in the dishwasher

inside of the counter? That probably falls a good bit lower than mutual love, care trust and respect, shared values,

you know, intimacy, commitment, progression, balance consistency.

So it is a preference and keep in mind that our preferences about how we like things for instance to be done around the house are different to our preferences for how we want to live. Now our preference are our

preferences.

preferences for how we want to live are our values.

And what we need when we are in a relationship is that we need to be in a relationship where there is a mutual meeting

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